The use of video feedback is popular, even usual, in fields involving social behaviour and interaction or physical performance. In other academic subject areas, the use of video as feedback is, as yet, uncommon. The work of others in this field covers group work, generic feedback, small numbers of students, samples and trials. We believe this may be one of the first studies on returning individual personalised feedback to a sizeable number of first year undergraduate students taking Computer Programming, or any other academic subject, for every assessment submitted on the unit.

Student engagement with feedback is often lacking and in that case, a valuable learning opportunity is missed. Previous work using audio as feedback showed 80% of students would prefer audio to written feedback. However, the separation of submitted programming code from audio comments still limits ease of reference to the work. The next natural step was to use video screen capture to augment the student experience by improving easy reference to work by simultaneously providing contextually relevant narrative and visually referring to elements of the work.